Side by Side Film Screening

Side by Side

Film Screening

Join us on Saturday, June 8th, 2024 at AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center for a film screening event featuring the documentary, Side by Side: Out of a South Korean Orphanage and Into the World.

This short film presents the stories of 9 Korean-born, inter-country adoptees, and is composed entirely of intensely intimate, first-person narratives, filmed in Seattle, Chicago, Boston, New York City, Paris, Stockholm, Amsterdam, and Melbourne—stories of a baby violently thrown from a car at an orphanage front door, being given away to a total stranger in a train station, the identity issues of feeling like a “Martian,” the complexities of being gay and a Korean-American adoptee, reuniting with birth parents and trying to make sense of relationships with mothers and fathers they’ve never known.

 

There will be two film screening times with Q&A sessions tailored to the specific audiences.

The first screening will be specifically for adult adoptees.

The second screening will be open to adoptive families and the professionals who serve them.

This film is recommended for teen adoptees and older.

Registration is free but seats are limited. There will be 75 seats for each screening time.

Group of young adults

Side by Side Film Screening for Adult Adoptees 

This screening is specifically for adult adoptees at the AFI Silver Theater. Filmmaker and director Glenn Morey will be lead a Q&A session after the screening and C.A.S.E. therapists will be on hand to provide support and answer questions.

WHEN:

Saturday, June 8, 2024 at 10:00AM (EST)

WHERE: 

AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center, 8633 Colesville Road, Silver Spring, MD

Register for Adult Adoptees' Film Screening
Mother Daughter Bond - C.A.S.E.

Side by Side Film Screening for Adoptive Families and Professionals

This screening is for adoptive families and professionals at the AFI Silver Theater. Filmmaker and director Glenn Morey will be lead a Q&A session after the screening and C.A.S.E. therapists will be on hand to provide support and answer questions.

WHEN:

Saturday, June 8, 2024 at 12:00 PM (EST)

WHERE: 

AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center, 8633 Colesville Road, Silver Spring, MD

Register for Adoptive Families & Professionals Film Screening

About the Side by Side Project

Glenn Morey is co-director of the documentary film project, Side by Side, presenting the stories of 100 adult Korean adoptees—filmed in 7 countries, 16 cities, and 6 languages. “Side by Side: Out of a South Korean Orphanage and Into the World” won the Gold Jury Award for Best Short Documentary at the Social Justice Film Festival, and was an Official Selection of the San Diego Asian Film Festival, Boston Asian American Film Festival, Dumbo Film Festival, and others.

In 2019, Side by Side was adapted as a New York Times Op Doc, “Given Away,” as well as a 12-screen video art installation that exhibited in Seoul and New York City. Side by Side has now been adapted as an Audible Original audiobook also titled, “Given Away,” and Glenn has been featured on NPR’s All Things Considered and Morning Edition.

This short documentary film is radically unconventional, composed almost entirely of 9 Korean adoptees filmed on a stark, white background. Four languages. Open captions throughout. The expected elements of the craft of filmmaking—visual storytelling, locations, b-roll—all absent.

What remains are the intimate and deeply private memories, knowledge, and stories of 9 subjects, made possible by the filmmaker’s own origin story as an abandoned infant in post-war South Korea, and his adoption to the U.S. These 9 adoptees are made very different by their disparate adoptive families, countries, and experiences. But they are bound forever by the singular experiences of separation from families of origin, and intercountry adoption.

No amount of filmmaking craft, in our minds, could make these stories more compelling, or these subjects more worthy of our empathy. So we left our craft at home, as we traveled the world in search of these people—9 interviews, selected out of 100 filmed in 7 countries, 16 cities, and 6 languages—all part of the greater Side by Side project and an unprecedented effort to deeply understand 65+ years of inter-country adoption out of South Korea.

In all of this, we were driven by “the danger of a single story,” as described by the author, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. We were inspired to minimalism by the one-house video portraits of the German photographer, Thomas Struth, and we were supported by the love and active participation of a worldwide community of inter-country adoptees out of South Korea.

 

 

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